Several utilities offer a snapshot of system performance – from Top or Uptime to Iostat, Netstat, and Mpstat – but what if you only learn of a bottleneck after it has happened? Sar to the rescue.

HPC Storage is arguably one of the most pressing issues in HPC. Selecting various HPC Storage solutions is a problem that requires some research, study, and planning to be effective – particularly cost-effective. Getting this process started usually means understanding how your applications perform I/O. This article presents some techniques for examining I/O patterns in HPC applications.